Romantic Robot » nonsense

Irrelevant BBC

Mark — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 18:35:23 +0000

As published today:

Why mention his houses? What has that got to do with the award? Why not mention his doctorate because he is a guy with intelligence? Why not mention that it was for good deeds? Or that he married the EastEnders actress? or “as seen above in a less than flattering photo”? Any of those are more relevant than his houses. (If you want the actual article which shows that indeed his houses are irrelevant, it’s here. And I’m sure the BBC are rejigging their urls. They used to be much weirder.)

Linking permission

Mark — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:43:07 +0000

Three years ago I highlighted the way a company called Evrsoft decided how people could link to them. It was very precise – to the pixel – and to be honest was a pile of nonsense. A link is a link and I’ll be damned if I am going to ask anyone to link. My site, my choice. They improved it hugely – http://www.evrsoft.com/linktous.shtml – though mentioning Netscape dates them somewhat.

Terms of Use
Permission to Link
You may link to the US-CERT web site by using “US-CERT” as a text hyperlink. If you wish to use an image of the US-CERT word mark, send email to webmaster@us-cert.gov and include the URL of the web site where you plan to place the link.
http://www.us-cert.gov/privacy.html

So the United States Government want to vet the image and the site and presumably get into an argument over the niceties. Don’t they realise that people on the internet and not in the USA may want to link? That they may not have read the Terms of Use (after all, who reads those eh?) and they may, just may, wish to ridicule in some way. So why start a fight you cannot possibly win? It’s the frigging internet and you shouldn’t need permission to link anywhere with any image and with any text and for any purpose.

Unless you want to link to vnunet. You should read all this little print first. http://www.vnunet.com/about/linkingtermsandconditions

http://advertising.gawker.com/legal/
RSS feed use
Gawker Media reserves the right to object to your presentation of the RSS feeds and the right to require you to cease using the RSS feeds at any time.

This one is odd. I can see why but I can’t see how. How do you stop a Fair Use? I’m sure you will have considered this yourself though seeing as “Please read this statement carefully before proceeding to access any of the GM Sites.”

I’m sure there are wackier things out there and yes I can see why from a legal pov why they are there because the fact they could act on something unwritten means there is no need to try and details so much surely?

Facebook and a fine

Mark — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:34:18 +0000

Facebook spammer fined $870m

“Does Facebook expect to quickly collect 873 million dollars and share the proceeds in some way with our users?” Mr Kelley asked in a posting on the Facebook blog. “Alas, no. …. But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users”

What? Someone spams FB, gets fined a stupid amount of money and is told never to use FB again or contact any of it’s members (So he says “Hi” to me and what happens?). Where is the penalty here? I see none. In fact, for kicks why doesn’t someone try to get a higher penalty against them?

Why in the USA do ridiculous monetary awards get handed down? It’s nonsense in every single respect.

Forum search limitations

Mark — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:01:04 +0000

Can anyone point to the experiences of forum owners that have had forum db’s crash because of searches? So many forums require you to complete a stupid damn captcha before you can Search. What catastrophic event occurred to warrant this nonsense? Which data was lost? What are you trying to do apart from monumentally annoy people both because they have to do one in the first place but also because they probably cannot change image when it is actually unreadable? Why are you putting blocks in the way of people actually trying to find information and not therefore post again to a forum what could be other be discovered?

Want to see nonsense in action?

Roundcube forums are an example. There are so very many more.

So..anyone want to answer?
“The reason we captcha forum searches is ….”